BHIF: The Great Lox Recall...

Tales from the Sauna. Wally Shawn. OJM Fashion Runway. The boys are back in town. It's good to be short. Hanky Panky. Intern update. The rise of the Dow Jones. Barney Greengrass.

Welcome to BHIF for Friday February 21, 2024. Baruch Hashem (Thank God) It’s Friday is The Old Jewish Men weekly roundup where we get to all the crap that actually matters in the world. Obituary winners. Matchmaking. Marketplace finds. Market watch. Omega watch. Complaint of the week. Joke of the week. You get the picture.

*NOTE FROM THE EDITOR*

Since BHIF’s establishment over a year ago, we’ve had a surprising amount of interest in newsletter-themed merchandise. Some woman from San Francisco asked us to make BHIF slippers that she would wear only after her bath on Fridays while flipping through our morning newsletter.

Sheesh, lady. Get a life.

What kinda woman has time for a bath on Friday morning anyways? Shouldn’t she be in the other room kneading challah or yelling at the butcher about the brisket price?

Despite our general opportunism and flare for mass-producing dead-stock, for some reason we haven’t started hawking BHIF-themed crap.

Let’s get to the bottom of this. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Tales from the Sauna

This is a guest post from Harvey J., a 67 year old semi-professional living in Brooklyn. Harvey, a lifelong Sauna Athlete, wrote to us asking if he could contribute something about the sauna, a sport that he claims has been overlooked in the newsletter. Here’s the Harvey Report:

Yesterday I hit my local heater in the early afternoon around three. Work is slow lately, money’s tight. If you’re wondering what I do, I’m a salesman, but I won’t go into much detail in order to protect my identity. Let’s just say electronics.

I’m a private person, but every man’s got a number.

Anyways, there I was, catching the mid day heat. Coupla fellas sat slumped on the benches, towels barely holding onto their girth, faces glowing like a busted taillight on a dark country road. It was hot in there — more so than usual.

Beads of sweat ran down foreheads like loose change spilling from a broken pocket. The whole place smelled like boiled skin, old sweat dried on the wood. Bad decisions need to be sweated out.

I see kids in the sauna now. Children. When you get old everyone looks like a kid. They don’t get it. A man doesn’t come here just to get hot—he comes to burn off the world, strip it down to nothing but heat, sweat, and silence.

I like to catch a heater before dinner—loosens the appetite, greases the joints. But lately, the banya’s been jammed tighter than a roll of quarters. I don’t mind sharing wood with rookies so long as they don’t leave a puddle of curdled ass. But these new guys? They come in medium rare. They don’t know the rank and file of a proper shvitz.

You don’t blast music. You don’t watch TV on your phone. And you sure as hell don’t come in yapping unless the room’s already warmed up to conversation. You ease in. If it’s a quiet night, you keep it that way—unless the vets decide otherwise. And trust me, they’ll let you know.

Sauna conversation’s like a poker table—there’s a fine line, and you don’t cross it. At a card table, men are playing with cash. In a sauna? They’re playing with heat, sweat, and the manhood between their legs. And let me tell you something—sitting in a room full of sweaty, naked men? That’s higher stakes than any game of gin rummy.

It’s different. Understand?

I don’t care to disclose where I go to break a sweat. But I don’t mind squeezing in tight with seasoned bathers, so long as everyone scrubs down before hitting the wood. No problem. But lately, sauna etiquette’s taken a dive.

See, there’s rookies, and then there’s sauna athletes. Guys like me. Fellas like my friend Moe G. He’s been coming to the same room every damn day for 30 years. When you do that you earn certain privileges. You wanna bring a radio into the heater? That’s your right.

You put in the time, you get the perks. That’s the game.

Understand?

For you lamb chops new to the heat slab, here’s some earth chatting sauna etiquette that will blow your mind. You’ll never shvitz the same again!